Chris Christie on War & Peace

Governors shouldn't offer opinions about Syria

Q: A deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program has fallen apart. Your take?

CHRISTIE: You know, I'm the governor of New Jersey. There a lot of people who are significantly better briefed on this than I am. And I think when guys like me start to shoot off
on opinions about this kind of stuff, it's really ill-advised. So I'll leave it to Secretary Kerry and the folks that are in charge of this to make decisions about where we go. And then once they put something together, if they do, then I'll make a
judgment on that. But it's just I'm not the right person to be asking that question to, with all due respect.

Q: But you're a national political figure. You're a leader in the Republican Party. You may someday run for president. Do you have a view
about whether Iran should continue to enrich uranium?

CHRISTIE: Like I said, I think the folks who are involved in this on a day to day basis should be making those kind of opinions known publicly. I'm just not going to engage in that.

America and Israel share beliefs and share enemies

Israel's enemies hate her for the same reason they hate America. There's a reason that America is referred to as the "Great Satan" and Israel is referred to as "Little Satan."
We both believe in self-government, we both believe in democracy and unalienable rights. From what I understand, the Knesset and Israel's free, vibrant news media make Trenton seems like a cordial and sleepy atmosphere.

Americans and Israelis both believe in free enterprise, accountability, in transparency, and in rewarding excellence. We both believe in the rule of law and limits on the power of the state. We both believe in peace through strength.

Since September 2000, 1,218 Israeli civilians have been killed in terror attacks. That would be the equivalent of over 48,000 Americans murdered by terrorists in the same period.

Iranian nukes are profoundly against our national security

Stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability must be a top priority of the United States of America. Any president, Republican or Democrat, who allows such a thing to occur on his watch, would be acting in a way that is profoundly against the
national security interests of the US and the security interests of our friends in Israel.

[Washington policymakers should] tell the truth about the difficulty of the solutions. We need to speak that truth out loud. It makes us uncomfortable.
It is a difficult set of words to string together, but we know that ignoring it will not make it go away, any more than ignoring our problems at home will make them go away either. America needs no introduction, but it is time that we start to
live up to our greatness again, by telling the truth to each other and being willing to listen to those hard truths. There is simply nothing more important if America wants to continue to lead a free and hopeful world.

I'm not a nation-building guy; we've achieved Afghan goals

Q: In Afghanistan, do you think the president is pulling troops out too fast?

A: You know, as the governor of New Jersey, I got to tell you, I'm not going to put my judgment in place of the president of the
United States who is briefed on this much more extensively than I am. And so I'm just not going to go there with that.

Q: You said that you wouldn't have pulled troops out.

A: I'm not a nation-building guy. And I do think that we have achieved a lot of what we wanted to achieve in Afghanistan, especially after the murder of bin Laden.
But he knows a lot more about this than I do. I'm not going to go down that road.

Source: Interview on NBC "Meet the Press"
, Jun 26, 2011

Don't pull troops out of Afghanistan until military says so

Q: Would you pull the troops out of Afghanistan now?

A: You know, I wouldn't do it now, but I would be guided by what our military advisers told us to do. But I do think that capturing bin laden and killing Bin Laden was one of the real goals of the
original Afghanistan intervention. and I'm not a nation-building kind of guy.

Q: But Americans have to be by default the world's policemen. and a lot of Americans I talked to are getting a bit fed up with spending all this money when there
are so many problems at home, on being the world's policemen. There are other superpowers emerging. Would you like to see a spreading of that load going forward where America's not the go-to country?
For military support, for helping out with despotic regimes and so on?